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Chapter 6: I Call a Spade a Spade

The first question:

Osho,Yesterday you said that you don’t need to know us all personally. I feel that every one of us is at a different place and has a different reason to be here in this life, so am I wrong if I feel that the way for everyone is different but leads to the same goal?

There is no goal and there is no way to it. You are already there, you have never been anywhere else. The very idea of the way and the goal is a mind game. First you create a goal, an ambition, a desire far away in the future, a utopia, worldly or otherworldly, Catholic or Communist, and then you start thinking about the ways. But basically there is no goal, hence all ways are false. And once you start trying to achieve the goal, you will get more and more into confusion.

All ways are just dream stuff, because in the first place you have never left home, you have only fallen asleep. Adam and Eve have never been expelled from the Garden of Eden, they have only fallen asleep. Eating from the tree of knowledge, the fruit of knowledge, they have become rational beings. That is their sleep; they have lost track of their own heart, they have forgotten about it. But it is there, it has not moved anywhere else.

You are still in the Garden of Eden, you are still in existence; where else can you be? There is no other place to be. This is my fundamental approach: that there is no goal, no way, you are not to achieve something. The whole idea of achieving is nothing but an ego trip. First you try to achieve money, power, prestige, and when you fail - which is bound to happen, because the mind goes on asking for more and more - when you are in deep frustration, you start turning into a religious person. But your whole pattern remains the same. You still desire a goal. Now it is no longer money, it is meditation; now it is no longer power but paradise. It is the same game being played with other words. Mind has deceived you, mind has taken you on another trip.

How long are you going to be deceived by your own mind? The emphasis is not on going anywhere but on waking up. For example, three thousand people are here right now; if you all fall asleep, you will all be here, nobody will have left the place but you will all dream separate dreams. Dreams are very private things; in fact there is nothing more private than a dream. You cannot even share your dream with your beloved, you cannot invite your friends to participate in a dream - it is impossible, you are absolutely alone there. A dream is not an objective phenomenon, it is not a reality; it is just an idea which has hypnotized you so much that it appears real. The presence of the other will reveal its unreality.